A Forgotten Future
by thethirteenthdoctor
Summary: Fic based on Season 3: The Family of Blood. What if, far off in the Doctor's future, someone changed something? A decision, a stopwatch. What if the Thirteenth Doctor had to cross her own time stream to save the universe? TENROSE and JethroxOC. R&R!
1. Skaro

Jethro leapt over the railing and turned to face the Doctor.

"Why are we moving?' he asked cautiously. "You said we were going to stay here another day."

The Doctor looked at him, hesitated, and said, "I don't know." The TARDIS was spinning through the Time Vortex, out of control, and the Doctor had no idea why. She guessed that maybe the TARDIS had picked up a disturbance that hadn't shown up on the scanners, and decided to follow it. Sexy did that sometimes.

Wait, sorry. Introductions. The Thirteenth Doctor: Regenerated after both hearts failed when electrocuted by the Silence. And yes, a girl. Jethro: Met Ten on a tour bus on the planet Midnight shortly before the tour bus was attacked by an unknown creature. Stood up for the Doctor and seemed much more open-minded, intelligent, and interested in the unknown than almost everyone else on the bus, although he was later pressured by his father into trying to throw the Doctor off the bus and to his death. He felt really bad about it afterward. Met Thirteen when the creature on Midnight struck again and he helped stop it with the Doctor, then became her companion.

The TARDIS landed, to her passengers' surprise, on Skaro. "Stay in the TARDIS," the Doctor told Jethro. "I'll try and sort this out." She snuck out, found herself in a corridor, walked along the corridor, to where it opened out into a room that served as sort of the Dalek Parliament room. She hid behind some machine, where she was joined by Jethro.

"I told you to stay in the TARDIS!" she hissed.

He looked at her. "You honestly expect me to stay in there while we're on Skaro?" he breathed. "I always wanted to go to Skaro!" The Doctor tried to keep a straight face, but she couldn't help it: his childish excitement was just so cute and funny. She gave Jethro a small smile, then turned her attention to the Dalek at the center of the room. They were focused on a machine, but the Doctor couldn't see it- her view was blocked by a Dalek.

She turned to Jethro. "Can you see that thing?" she asked.

"Yes."

"What does it look like?"

"I'd say it's a quantum temporal event-specific recalibrator."

"How the hell did you know that?"

"History class was always my best subject. The Daleks invented those in the year 2473, right?'

"Yes," the Doctor whispered, duly impressed and wishing all her companions could recognize a quantum temporal event-specific recalibrator on sight. "But, of course, they're incredibly difficult to make, they require a load of time energy and if you get it wrong, the entire galactic quadrant you're in could implode. However, if you do get it right, they can be used to rewrite a specific event in the past in one specific way. Even a fixed point. But it can only be used once and god, I don't even know if I could make one in less than a hundred or two years. The Daleks must have been working on it for at least two centuries. So the question is, what point in time is important enough that the Daleks would spend two centuries working on a machine to change it?"

"Maybe the Time War?" Jethro offered. "They might want to change it so the Daleks would win."

"No, the Time War is time-locked. And even then, there's too much room for unwanted change. See, you have to pick one fairly small decision or seemingly insignificant person to change, and hope that the outcome is what you wanted. The Daleks don't want the Time Lords surviving."

"So it has to do with you, then." "That would seem the logical assumption."

At that moment, one of the Daleks spoke. "IT IS READY," it said in its scratchy, metallic voice.

The big white Dalek, the leader, said, "THEN BEGIN." It turned to the watching Daleks and said, "TODAY THE DOCTOR IS EXTERMINATED. WATCH AS HE FALLS."

"Bit dramatic," the Doctor said.

"Doctor," Jethro whispered. "They said he. That means they don't recognize you now. That's good, right?"

"You're smart," the Doctor observed.

"So what do we do?"

"Er... we wait. There's not much we can do right now. Then once they're done, we see if it worked and if it did, we figure out where and when the change happened and go fix it before I die."

"So... the usual then."

"Very funny."

Finally, the Daleks left the room, announcing, "THE DALEK EMPIRE STANDS VICTORIOUS!" and the Doctor and Jethro stood up.

"Nothing's changed," Jethro said. "Doesn't that mean it didn't work?"

"No. When you're me, you affect the universe a lot. So, when me ceases to exist, it takes a while for the changes I've made to be unmade and for the universe to figure out what it's like now, how civilizations and conspiracies and empires developed without me to stop them and how civilizations and species and galaxies fell without me to save them, and finally for me to cease to exist. But not long. We need to work quickly."

She ran over to the machine and soniced it. "Oh, this is bad. This is very, very, bad."

Jethro went to her. "What? Or, when?"

The Doctor sighed and looked up at him. "England, 1913."

"What happened then?"

"For very complicated reasons, I was being chased and the only way for me to hide was to become human so I put my Time Lord identity into a stop watch that I gave to Martha Jones, my companion, to keep safe and I became a human professor at a boarding school for boys- I mean, that's the only sort of school they had in 1913- but the Family of Blood- thats who I was hiding from, by the way- tracked me down but I didn't remember being a Time Lord except in my dreams and then a little boy stole the stopwatch and the Family attacked the school because they wanted me so they could become immortal and I didn't want to be the Doctor because I liked my human life and so I wanted to just give the Family the stopwatch -this was after the little boy gave it back- so they'd maybe leave but then I was convinced to become the Doctor and I defeated them."

"So the Daleks made it so you stayed human."

"Exactly. Then I never did anything to stop them after that, and I never regenerated because I was human so I don't exist."

"Then we should go to England."


	2. 1913

They arrived in a small shed near the school and crept out- the Doctor having given up on telling Jethro to wait in the TARDIS.

"How about I go into the school and make sure the students are all right and you can do whatever the hell it is you do?" Jethro offered.

"That sounds like the closest thing to a plan we've got."

Jethro watched the Doctor walk away, her brown hair swinging behind her, unable to fathom that this might be the last time he would ever see her. Would he even remember her? Would he be transported to his life the way it was before he ran away with her? Or would he remember, would he be doomed to spend the rest of his life- wherever that would be- knowing that he couldn't save the Doctor and now she was gone forever? He couldn't decide which was worse.

As she disappeared from view, he pictured her face in his mind, pictured the adventures they'd had, and held the memories close as he turned and walked away, imagining a life like the one this human Doctor was living, where he remembered their story only in his dreams.

Baines and Jenny (the schoolboy and maid whose bodies had been possessed by Son of Mine and Mother of Mine) were standing at the entrance to the school with their army of scarecrows standing behind them. "I sense the Doctor," said Son of Mine. "He is close. The scent is faint, but he is- but Mother of Mine, do you smell what I do?"

Mother of Mine said, "I smell the Doctor. He is strong. He is... behind us?"

They turned around just in time to see one of the scarecrows pull off its "face" to reveal a teenage girl with brown hair, who shoved through the crowd and jumped over Son of Mine and Mother of Mine's heads yelling, "Oi! Time Lord coming through!"

The Doctor ran through the school until finally finding Tim Latimer, the boy with the stopwatch, hidden in a corner. She crouched down to face him. "Tim," she said softly, "you need to give that watch to John Smith."

Tim looked at her. "But I have to keep it safe. You don't understand!"

"I'd say I understand better than you. See, when he dies, he doesn't die. He changes, his form changes. You can understand that, can't you?" Tim nodded, and the Doctor smiled. "Good. I'm him. From the future. I remember everything that has happened here today and everything that will happen. But someone is changing it, so I need to come here and fix it or I'll die and you'll die and everyone else here will die. And you need to give him that stopwatch."

Tim looked at her. "No," he said. "I don't even know if you're telling the truth, and besides, you're a girl. Seventeen, I'd guess."

She looked at him, and he saw that her eyes had lost their softness.

"I am the Doctor," she said. "I am two thousand seventy-four years old. I saw your Earth form. I watched as the creatures that would someday be humans first crawl out of the depths of the ocean. I have brought down empires and saved billions. I've burned up stars, just to say goodbye. I've watched civilizations fall. I've seen the universe, and it is beautiful and dangerous and powerful and everlasting. I've saved you humans so, so many times. I am the last of the Time Lords. I defeated the Daleks. I am the Oncoming Storm, and I will not be stopped by a stubborn schoolboy."

Tim looked at her and said, "I'll give it to him when I see him."

"Good boy."

The Doctor sat in an empty room, tapping her fingers on the arm of her chair. Battlefield jitters. She had no idea what to do. At that moment, she saw outside her window Father Mine and about ten scarecrows dragging a TARDIS out in front of the school.

She heard Father Mine taunting the other Doctor, but what she focused on was the TARDIS. And it was wrong. The light at the top, the width of the box. The Tenth Doctor's TARDIS had never looked like that. But hers did. She ran outside, into the forest where she knew her past self was hiding. She came up behind him, Martha, and the matron and sat down behind them with her face between the Doctor's and Martha's.

"Hello," she said. "I'm the Doctor. From the future. But never mind that, just don't go into that TARDIS."

"I know, it's guarded by the scarecrows," Martha said. "But you're not the Doctor, this is the Doctor."

"Martha Jones, you left me. You haven't done it yet but you will. And I forgave you. But I am NOT going to deal with this right now, especially not from you! Now, that TARDIS isn't your TARDIS, it's mine. So if you go in there, you'll rip a hole in time and that would be bad. Just thought I'd throw that out there."

After Martha, the matron, and the other Doctor left for Cartwright Cottage, a place where they figured they'd be safe, the Doctor waited around for a minute, hoping that Jethro would show up. She'd figured that he had left the school, but had no idea where he was, and she was getting a bit worried. But it was Tim Latimer who came running toward her, flushed and out of breath. "Where's the Doctor?" he asked. "Cartwright Cottage," she said. "I'll come with you." So she followed him, glancing back every second or so, hoping that Jethro would appear there.


	3. Cartwright Cottage

Tim knocked on the door to the cottage, and Martha opened it to let him and the Doctor in. Tim crossed the room and held the stopwatch out to the Doctor.

"Why didn't you give this to the Doctor before?' the matron asked.

"Because it was waiting," said Tim, "and because I was shy.

"I've seen the Doctor," he continued. "He's... like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night, and the storm in the heart of the sun."

"Stop it," said John Smith, but Tim continued.

"He's ancient and forever. He burns at the center of time, and he can see the turn of the universe."

"Stop it! I said stop it!" the other Doctor said, but Tim paid him no mind.

"And he's wonderful."

"Doctor," said Martha. "Please, open the watch. We need the Doctor. And I... well, I love him to bits. I really hope you don't remember me saying that."

"I didn't," the Doctor said. She looked at Martha. "I had no idea. I'm sorry I never knew."

"Back to the point," announced John Smith. "I don't want to be the Doctor. I don't want to be lonely or powerful. I like this life. I'm not going to change."

Martha started to protest, but was cut short by a cry from the Doctor. Her hands were slowly disintegrating into golden light- regeneration energy.

"What's happening?" the Matron asked the Doctor.

"I'm unraveling. Everything that happened to me after this is disappearing. My past is unraveling and so am I. I don't have much time.

"Look at me," she said."Doctor- John, look at me. You've saved so many people, so many that you will never save if you don't open that stopwatch. You saved my companion, Jethro- well, he might have been able to save himself, I don't know- who's probably somewhere running away right now. He does that. It's rather embarrassing, although he has mastered that battle strategy where you run away and then come back a few hours later when the enemy is tired from fighting the rest of your group and you dominate them. The problem is, he doesn't mean to do it. Anyways, er, there are loads of people who need the Doctor, people you haven't saved yet. And there's one person who needs you most of all. The person you need most of all. The reason you didn't think to tell Martha what to do in case there was a woman. And don't pretend you don't remember her, because if you remembered anything, if you dreamed of any of your adventures, you dreamed of her. Rose Tyler."

Something happened in John Smith's face when she said that name.

"She means everything to us, you and me, don't you remember? She seemed like nothing special, but when we grabbed her hand that day, so long ago and so far in the future, we knew. She saved our life so many times, she gave a Dalek emotions from her touch just because of her kindness. Do you remember that? Do you remember when she dangled over London wearing a Union Jack in the middle of a war? Do you remember when she became Bad Wolf, just to save us? Do you remember her laugh, her blonde hair, her brown eyes? And do you remember how she sacrificed herself, that day in Torchwood? Do you remember that now she wanders in a parallel universe, her life passing by, separated from you forever? Do you remember how we burned up a sun, just to say goodbye to her? Do you remember that she was worth it, always worth it, and a thousand times again?"

The Doctor- the other Doctor- had tears rolling down his face. "I remember. I remember every moment."

"Well you know what? You're going to see her again. Rose Tyler. There could be no one like her. And you're going to see her again. She's going to get her happy ending after all. But not if you stay human." The Doctor's arms and legs had completely turned into golden light, but she wasn't regenerating. The regeneration energy was leaving her. Soon, she wouldn't exist.

* * *

**A/N: Some Tenrose feels for you!**


	4. Bad Wolf

Suddenly, there was a crashing sound from outside the cottage, and a very familiar voice swore magnificently.

"Jethro!" the Doctor called out, relieved.

He came in through the door, his back covered in dirt, cursing under his breath. When he saw her, he ran over to her. "Oh god," Jethro said. "It's happening."

She nodded. "Jethro, you recognize him?" She asked, tilting her head toward the other Doctor.

Jethro spun around and smiled. "Doctor! You're the one I met!"

"He hasn't met you yet," the Doctor said, explaining John Smith's confused expression. Jethro turned back to his Doctor, who was still dematerializing. She looked at the other Doctor and said, "Oh god, if Rose Tyler's happiness doesn't convince you, I don't know what will. Or, should I say, oh Rose. Because we don't believe in God, do we? We believe in a goddess. A goddess named Bad Wolf. Because we've seen good gods and bad gods and demigods and would-be gods. We've seen the whole pantheon. And out of that, out of all that, we believe in one thing. We believe in her. Right, Doctor?"

At this point, she was just a golden form. John Smith turned his head and thought hard, while the Doctor turned to Jethro.

He looked at her. "There's no hope, then?"

"I'm afraid not."

Martha and the Matron were trying to convince the other Doctor, but stopped when they heard those words. Everyone's eyes were on the Doctor and Jethro.

"Isn't there anything I can do?" Jethro was crying.

"No," came the heart-wrenching answer. "I'm sorry, Jethro. I'm so, so sorry. In a few moments, I'll be gone, and I'm sorry. I'll be a story in your head. So make it a good one, alright? Because we were. We were the best." She realised that she was quoting herself, but to be fair, it was very nearly the same situation. Except, in this case, not even something that could be remembered could be brought back.

"Actually," she said, "There's one thing you can do for me. You're a time traveller. You've seen the universe, you've watched time pass. So if you try, I think you can remember." She was crying, too. "That's what I want you to do. One last thing. Miss me."

It was a strange sensation, a bit like frostbite. Her skin tingled, then went numb. She could feel the void of oblivion surrounding her. She had expected it to hurt more, but this was worse. It felt like nothing, and she knew there was nothing more for her. Maybe dying would have something beyond, but this wasn't dying. This was never existing.

Maybe she ought to quote herself one last time, the words that were never said.

"So I suppose," she began, "if it's my last chance to say it-" she was going now, the time had come. "Jethro, I-"

And then there was nothing. The Doctor disappeared. Jethro would never know what she was about to say. He might not even remember what she had said.

John Smith put his hand on Jethro's shoulder. "She loves you," he said quietly. "That's what I said to Rose-" his voice broke. "I never got to finish my sentence either. But maybe... maybe I will. Martha, give me the stopwatch."

When the Doctor opened the stopwatch, golden light illuminated him, but some of it swirled to the place where Jethro's Doctor had stood, and it spiraled into a glowing form, which quickly materialized into the Doctor- his Doctor. She inhaled sharply, opened her eyes to meet his, and said, "... love you."

* * *

**A/N: That was fast! **

**R&amp;R please!**


	5. The Song Never Ends (author's note)

**This is just a notice.**

**There's no need to follow this story, it's over.**

**HOWEVER:**

**If you click ****_on_**** my profile, you can find the story ****_Bright as the Midnight Sun,_**** which is the PREQUEL to this one.**

**I decided I love Jethro and Thirteen so much, I can't possibly be done with them. And if you like them, go ahead and read Bright as the Midnight Sun!**

**I'll be updating it within the week!**

**You're all fantastic!**


End file.
